Июнь Ли - Where Reasons End

It’s possible, I said. Wait until you learn the imaginary number.

Mommy, I’m not stupid, he said. I know imaginary numbers, but I don’t like to deal with that troublesome i.

(I had borrowed the dream to open a talk once. Nikolai had been proud of it, but his little brother, J., disapproved, saying the metaphor was too neat.)

Here’s an earlier one. Nikolai was five, and one day he told me a dream not from the night before, but from a few weeks earlier. It had taken him weeks to think about it before he could tell me:

I dreamed that you were driving the minivan uphill and you parked near Mari’s house. Then you died, just sitting there. Many flowers fell onto the minivan and covered it. Then the whole thing became not so real-life, but like an oil painting. I woke up and cried for a long time and couldn’t sleep.

Here’s a recent one, less than two months before he died:

I dreamed last night we were traveling. We were going through security and a TSA agent said to J. and me: I’ll be grading your conveying. And you snapped: Don’t dandelize the dandelion.

What does that mean? I said.

I don’t know, he said. In my dream I thought you made up the phrase on the spot to fight and you were pretty clever.

Don’t dandelize the dandelion, I said now. I almost snapped at a student yesterday using the line.

Don’t plagiarize my dream, Nikolai said.

I didn’t. I gave her a stern lecture instead.

What snappable error did she make?

She said she didn’t want to be serious, and she wanted to write fluffy stories so she could laugh at her characters.

What fluffy delusions a young person can afford, Nikolai said.

You’re young, too, I said.

Not the way your student is young, he said.

What are your delusions like?

Does everyone have to have some delusion to live? he asked.

Does one have to have some delusion so as to be willing to die, I thought.

There’s a fundamental difference, he said. You only die once.

So that’s the end of the delusion?

Not in the sense that it disappears, he said, no. You still have it. Only it’s no longer delusion but reality.

Is it not the case for the living? You treat the delusion as reality?

You don’t meet your delusions when you’re alive.

Like somewhere over the rainbow? I said.

Oh gosh, I thought, how I do think with words that are not mine these days.

It’s okay, he said. You’re forgiven.

I remembered an early spring day five years ago. I took Nikolai and his brother to a seaside town, and after lunch we linked arms and sang all the way down the block, We’re off to see the Wizard, The wonderful Wizard of Oz.

I remember that, Nikolai said. We must have looked so silly.

We looked happy, I said. It was off-season, and even adding up our ages, we still came below the average age of the local population. In the street, people smiled at our linked arms and choreographed steps, yet I was far from what they imagined. It was the year of my disintegration, and I could find few delusions to live for.

At least you make a point of appearing happy to everyone, he said.

You do, too.

I’m not as good at that as you are, he said.

His friends had written after, saying what a warm, cheerful, and happy person he had been in their eyes. A few had asked how they had missed his pain, what they could have done to save him. For some people a façade is necessary even with friends—especially so with those closest—but this I couldn’t explain to the young, bruised hearts.

To live you have to propagate delusions, Nikolai said. One is not enough. A few are not.

How many are enough?

Are you asking me? You’re the one living.

It’s like asking the blind for directions, isn’t it, I said, translating a Chinese saying for him.

Which, if you think about it, is nonsense. Who can say a blind person doesn’t know the directions better?

Where should I go from here?

Oh you know you’re doing fine.

I didn’t know it. I wasn’t feeling fine. I had but one delusion, which I held on to with all my willpower: We once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood; and I’m doing it over again, this time by words.

A good tactic is to diversify your delusions, he said. Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket kind of thing.

I couldn’t refrain from pointing out that he had used a cliché.

Whatever, he said.

Sorry, I said. Still, please enlighten me.

Oh, do what the squirrels do. Dig a hole and store a handful of delusions there, and dig another one and store more. Some delusions are for today. Some are for tomorrow. Some take a few months to ripen. Keep them dry so they don’t get moldy. Keep them private so others don’t step on them by accident or dig them up and steal them. Be patient. Delayed gratification is the key to a successful life of delusions. And if you’re lucky, some delusions become self-seeded. Some even go wild like dandelions.

Are you making fun of me?

Indeed I am, he said. Nobody needs to be taught how to live under delusions. It’s like sleeping.

There is a condition called insomnia, I said.

Insomniacs still sleep, he said.

Not efficiently, I said. Isn’t it what insomniacs suffer, not having sleep of good quality? Barely hanging on?

As you’ve often discouraged me from pursuing perfection, I would say, Mommy, just do your best and stay contented with being a middling delusionist.

I wondered whether it was possible for anyone to be a middling delusionist. Seems to me, I said, a delusionist cannot take an adjective. You are one, or you are not.

Any noun can take an adjective if you know your grammar.

I tried to come up with examples to challenge his faith in adjectives. A procrastinating tree, a lofty shadow, an estival trance, a burdensome coda.

The ineffable miasma of incompetent words, he said. What do you call an aneurysm of a mind that’s clotted by words?

As long as I stay clear of adjectives I remain uncluttered, I said.

Why such dislike of adjectives?

I oppose anything judgmental, I said, and adjectives are opinionated words. Happy, sad. Long, short. Live, dead. Young, old. Even the simplest adjective claims such entitlement to judge. Not to mention they come with those abusive forms of the comparative and the superlative.

I beg to differ, he said. A noun is a wall, an adjective is a window.

I laughed.

What’s so funny?

There is no adjective in your astute and definitive statement, I said.

Fine. How about this: A noun is a self-defeating wall, an adjective is a tenacious window.

Self-defeating how? Tenacious how? I said. I was sitting next to a window, in the room that was called Nikolai’s room. Outside were the procrastinating trees that had not shed their leaves as ordained by the season, which had made the gutter cleaners scratch their heads. In our old house in California we had large windows surrounded by trees that remained green all year round, and there Nikolai used to listen to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons at night. In this new house there were definable seasons outside, but he would only have memories of the four seasons from music, not from experience.

Self-defeating as your mind is self-defeating, he said. Tenacious as my mind is tenacious.

Such immodesty, I said. My mind is not a closed room.

Mine has more windows, he said.

What is outside your windows?

All the good things you can’t see.

Like what?

A garden of superlative adjectives. A path paved with lively adverbs. Poems without themes. Songs without names. There are ways to live not as a noun, or inside a noun, or among other nouns.

Yet it’s all the nouns in the world that make room for the living, I thought. The living need the space within four walls.